October 24, 2012

Naomi Alderman talks to the Toronto Star about writing a serialized zombie novel with Margaret Atwood.

"We sort of challenged each other, one chapter I ended with a now-get-out-of-that situation, where someone is trapped by a zombie, and I'd think, 'Well, Margaret, see what you do with that!' And then she'd set me up with jokes to carry on and emotional situations to resolve," Alderman says.

The A.V. Club: Listening to Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds now, without the distraction from the Oasis breakup, it sounds like it has joy in it, something that might have been missing from the last couple of Oasis records.

Noel Gallagher: Well, the real difference is that I've written the whole album. On Oasis records, there were always four songwriters, so you would never get a concise feel or flow. Liam would write a certain kind of song and Gem [Archer] would write a certain kind of song and Andy [Bell] would do the same. Then, you put them all together and try to make them fit as best as you can. This album has a very definite narrative. That’s just 'cause I've written it all and I put it all together. I guess it's just more of a personal statement. But I agree with you. There is a lot of joy on it.

Attenberg's success lies in miniatures; she mutes even the few potential moments of conflict, focusing instead on the inaudible repercussions. But with a wit that never mocks and a tenderness that never gushes, she renders this family's ordinary tragedies as something surprisingly affecting.

KH: There is an enormous amount of music being released but I don't understand why certain things pick up and others don’t. I feel there isn't any particularly great kind of music media around; magazines are all really suffering and no one is getting paid. If you were a kid nowadays you wouldn't be dreaming of being a music journalist. I think the thing that irritates me the most though is the way the major record labels still dominate the scene. For a moment everyone thought “oh, piracy is going to change things” but their response was to dig their heels even harder and dominate the market even more. They are controlling things in a very full-on way. I grew up in the nineties where there was a very strong D.I.Y. aesthetic and I really want to see that kind of behaviour encouraged more and more.

Your stories are at once deeply personal, but also very much about entire generations of Americans. I know you did a lot of research in order to fill in the gaps of your father's WWII experience that he couldn't or wouldn't talk about.

I felt a real responsibility to write about ordinary guys like him. There aren't really a lot of books written about the grunts. Yet, my books aren't just about my dad's war experience; they're about how WWII shaped generations. I believe lots of men had PTSD like my Dad. It shut them down inside. If we'd had fully available fathers, emotionally and spiritually, the rebellion of the 60's and 70's maybe wouldn't have happened.